Any sufficiently advanced technology is in distinguishable from magic.

Instagram Stories launches geostickers as its Snap attack continues

Instagram is steadily closing its feature gap with Snapchat. Today, Instagram launched its first geostickers, which let users add and arrange illustrations to their Stories posts related to their locations.

The first places getting city-wide and special neighborhood geostickers are New York City and Jakarta, Indonesia. These add to Instagram Stories’ existing location stickers that add the name of a place to your shots. All users worldwide can access the Instagram geostickers with today’s 10.11 update on iOS and Android.

Snapchat launched its own Geofilters back in 2014, which can’t be rearranged or resized. It added moveable Geostickers in August 2016 to give people more customization over their location-based creativity tools. The one thing Instagram’s geostickers and filters do that Snap’s don’t is show the Instagram location page for that place with a tap, though Stories posts won’t show up there, so there’s no privacy issue with that.

Instagram’s geostickers look almost identical to Snapchat’s, seen here

With geostickers in place, the last big Snapchat feature missing from Instagram Stories is augmented reality selfie Lenses. Facebook acquired MSQRD last year to bring these AR masks to its products. Yet despite their rollout on Facebook and Messenger, they haven’t come to Instagram yet. But the app is likely brewing its own unique take on the format before it makes its next push to do Snapchat better than Snapchat.

All of Instagram’s cloning efforts seem to be paying off. Instagram Stories already has 150 million daily users, more than Snap’s original version of the feature. Instagram Stories is stealing Snapchat usage, which led Snapchat’s user growth to plummet 82 percent in the two quarters after Facebook’s copycat spun up. Now worries about Snap’s growth are sinking into its share price, which slumped 12 percent yesterday and 11 percent today after its 40 percent IPO pop.

All eyes will be on Snap’s first earnings report, and whether it can fight off Instagram’s clone and reinvigorate its growth.